Ambient Contrast Ratio of Lcds and OLED Displays
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Vol. 25, No. 26 | 25 Dec 2017 | OPTICS EXPRESS 33643 Ambient contrast ratio of LCDs and OLED displays * HAIWEI CHEN, GUANJUN TAN, AND SHIN-TSON WU College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida 32816, USA *[email protected] Abstract: We systematically analyze the ambient contrast ratio (ACR) of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays for smartphones, TVs, and public displays. The influencing factors such as display brightness, ambient light illuminance, and surface reflection are investigated in detail. At low ambient light conditions, high static contrast ratio plays a key role for ACR. As the ambient light increases, high brightness gradually takes over. These quantitative results set important guidelines for future display optimization. Meanwhile, to improve an OLED’s ACR at large oblique angles, we propose a new broadband and wide-view circular polarizer consisting of one linear polarizer and two biaxial films. Good performance is realized. © 2017 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement OCIS codes: (120.2040) Displays; (230.3720) Liquid-crystal devices; (160.3710) Liquid crystals. References and links 1. D. K. Yang and S. T. Wu, Fundamentals of Liquid Crystal Devices, 2nd ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2014). 2. H. Seetzen, W. Heidrich, W. Stuerzlinger, G. Ward, L. Whitehead, M. Trentacoste, A. Ghosh, and A. Vorozcovs, “High dynamic range display systems,” ACM Trans. Graph. 23(3), 760–768 (2004). 3. Q. Hong, T. X. Wu, X. Zhu, R. Lu, and S. T. Wu, “Extraordinarily high-contrast and wide-view liquid-crystal displays,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 86(12), 121107 (2005). 4. H. Chen, R. Zhu, M. C. Li, S. L. Lee, and S. T. 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Introduction Contrast ratio (CR) is a key display metric to achieve supreme image quality [1–4], especially, to enable high dynamic range (HDR) [2, 5]. For an emissive display, like organic light-emitting diode (OLED), its CR can approach 1,000,000:1 or even higher [6–8]. Whereas for a non-emissive liquid crystal display (LCD), its CR is limited due to the depolarization effects from thin film transistors, LC layer, and color filters. For example, the CR of a commercial multi-domain vertical alignment (MVA) LCD TV is about 5000:1 [9]. For other LCD modes, such as twisted nematic [10] and fringe field switching [11], it is about 2000:1. As a result, it is generally perceived that OLED shows much better performance than LCD in terms of contrast ratio. This is true at dark ambient. However, in reality, no matter indoor or outdoor, ambient light is inevitable. Thus, how these two display technologies perform under different ambient lighting conditions is a practically important concern. To evaluate a display’s performance in the presence of ambient light, a metric called ambient contrast ratio (ACR) should be considered for real working scenarios [12–15].